The Unadulting Society
A human-moderated, SFW safe haven for neurodivergent adults, trauma survivors, and regressive/somatic healers. Zero tolerance for bad actors.
Forum » Rebuilding trust in my own body signals after years of being told I'm wrong
Rebuilding trust in my own body signals after years of being told I'm wrong
I don't trust my own body anymore. Not because my body is untrustworthy — but because years of medical gaslighting have convinced me that I can't interpret my own signals correctly. "That's not really pain." "You're just anxious." "It's all in your head." "Have you considered that you might be exaggerating?"
Now when I feel something — hunger, pain, fatigue, overstimulation — my first thought isn't "how do I meet this need?" It's "am I making this up? Is this real? Should I wait and see if it gets worse before I do anything about it?" I've been trained to ignore my body's signals until they become crises, because anything short of a crisis was dismissed as "not that bad."
How do you rebuild interoception — the ability to sense and trust your own internal cues — after years of being told your experience isn't valid?
Replies (4)
Fountain pens taught me that pressure matters. Too much and the nib catches. Too little and nothing flows. It took me months to find the right balance. I think bodies work the same way — we push too hard or we give up entirely, and the right pressure point is somewhere in the middle, and the only way to find it is practice.
so i'm a miniature builder and i've noticed that scale matters for my brain in a way i can't fully explain. when things are tiny, they're manageable. the world is too big and too loud most of the time but a 1:24 scale room is exactly the right size. maybe there's a version of that for body stuff — scaling down the input until it's digestible. one small sensory win at a time.
This is such important work and so few people understand how profoundly medical gaslighting damages interoception. 💛 What helped me: I started with one body signal at a time. I picked "hunger." For a week, I checked in with my body every two hours: "On a scale of 1-10, how hungry am I right now?" I didn't have to DO anything with the information — just notice it. Then I started acting on it: if I was at a 3, I ate a snack. If I was at a 6, I ate a meal. The key was that I didn't wait until I was at an 8 (starving, shaky, headache) before responding. I practiced responding to the MID-LEVEL signals. Each time I honored a signal, my body learned: "Oh, I can send smaller signals now. They'll be heard." It's like rebuilding a communication channel, one signal at a time. Start small. Celebrate every time you catch a body cue and respond to it before it becomes a crisis.
i read somewhere that the hands have more nerve endings than almost anywhere else on the body, which means working with your hands is literally giving your brain a massive amount of sensory data to process. sometimes i think my hobbies aren't distractions from my body stuff — they're a different way of processing the same signals. my hands are having a conversation my brain can't have in words.
Log in to reply.
« Back to forum